How to get second tag by regex

Question

I don't understand how to get in the second match aaaa and not eeee

my regex:

<item>.*?<sub>(.*?)<\/sub>.*?<value>(.*?)<\/value>.*?<\/item>

content:

<item> fffffffffffff
<sub>aaaa</sub>
<value>111</value>
</item>

<item>
<sub>eeee</sub> arg34ddddddddddddddd
<atag>ddd</atag>
<sub>aaaa</sub>
<atag>dddg</atag>
<value>222</value>
</item>

Can I get it in a step or do I need running a regex several times?

UPDATE

I want to get the result like this:

[ [ 'aaaa', 111],['aaaa', 222] ]

Is it possible?

What exactly do you want to match ? Do you want to match only `_aaaa` and that's it ? — whatamidoingwithmylife, Mar 03 '18 at 22:07
XML parsing would seem a lot more appropriate/efficient for this task. — Jeto, Mar 03 '18 at 22:13
Are you trying to match `sub` nodes that are followed immediately by a `value` node? — revo, Mar 03 '18 at 22:27
How will you be running this regex? From any particular language? editor? — Saleem, Mar 03 '18 at 22:35
Check if this is what you are trying to do https://regex101.com/r/bpsAo9/1 — revo, Mar 03 '18 at 22:35
I'll suggest consider using XML parser such as https://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html or even https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/ — Saleem, Mar 05 '18 at 22:54

mrzasa · Answer 1 · 2018-03-03T22:30:19.640

-1

Try

<item>[\s\S]*?<sub>(.*?)<\/sub>((?!<sub>)[\s\S])*<\/item>

Demo

This takes only the last sub you have between items.

Explanation:

<item>[\s\S]*? matches lazily anything between item and sub tags
(.*?)<\/sub> matches sub tag and captures its content
((?!)[\s\S])*<\/item> uses Tempered Greedy Token to assure that after the sub that was matched before, there is no more sub tags before the closing item tag

edited Mar 03 '18 at 22:30

answered Mar 03 '18 at 22:10

mrzasa

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What if first `_aaaa` doesn't have a following ``? – revo Mar 03 '18 at 22:11
You can make that part optional: `[\S\s]*?_{(.*?)<\/sub>[\s\S]*?((.*?)<\/value>[\S\s]*?)?<\/item>` [Demo](https://regex101.com/r/CdEuTl/3/) but is it the case in OP problem? If we need to deal with sth more complex (more optional values), I'd better go with XML parser instead.} – mrzasa Mar 03 '18 at 22:14
That's the point. Requirements are not clear either and in your demo `_eeee` is matched which shouldn't. – revo Mar 03 '18 at 22:16

How to get second tag by regex

1 Answers1